Ten Globalization Challenges to Higher Education Quality and Quality Assurance

Contemporary globalization has rapidly developed into a complex system of circuits of exchange, interactive dynamics, and structures that collectively interact at high levels to produce rapid change affecting most aspects of human life. Like most complex systems contemporary globalization acts to produce outcomes that are difficult to foresee, but which operate to influence most aspects of the system. Higher education as an intrinsic element of contemporary globalization is implicated throughout these interactive dynamics and effects. This paper examines ten aspects of globalization which can usefully be viewed as challenges to higher education especially in its efforts to develop varied ideas and demonstrations of quality and systems of quality assurance that will be useful and sustainable in this environment.